How do you manage with this new album coming out and with all the publicity – how do you manage with your family, your time for God and also organising things at the record label and everything?

I have a lot of great people who I work with. To have the staff at Gotee, they are amazing, I don’t have to babysit them. They know what they are doing. I’m blessed to be on the road – finding new artists and hand them over to a staff that I have total confidence in. The people at EMI CMG that I work with are at my artistry level. They are professionals and they believe in what I’m doing as much as I do.

As to my family, you know my wife has told me many times, and she even affirmed it last Saturday night that she’s struggling right now – I’m on the road a lot and it’s hard for her especially now that we adopted twins a year and a half ago. But she’s just come backstage and and said to me ‘Look, you know you have a gift and I’m so proud that you are out there using it for the kingdom’. It’s basically having great people around you – people that are better than you. It’s such a blessing – I could never do what I do if it weren’t for the great people that God has brought into my life. The hardest thing for me right now is how to tour and make a record at the same time. I am getting these touring opportunities; Third Day tour is obviously a big deal and a blessing but I have to finish this record. I have like nine songs on and I need three more. I don’t see a window yet so I could use your prayers on that.

Speaking of your new record, are you manning the production or are you bringing some other people as producers as well?

I am co-producing with a bunch of people. I look at it as a massive buffet in front of me. Like I got to write with guys from Earthsuit on the first single Phenomenon and with just different people, so I am producing, coproducing with 4-5 guys on pretty much the whole record. I think maybe one of my problems was that I chased too many things at the beginning but I’m slowly gathering it back in and figuring out what are the pieces of gold and what’s the trash.

You play such a huge impact on young people. What’s the main thing of God maybe you should now do differently now that you have gone solo from when you were in the ministry of dc Talk?

I think the things I am getting opportunities to do are. Umm obviously DC Talk sorta started out with an urban influence and began toward the end of the era of DC Talk to move away from that urban influence. I was that urban quotient, so I sacrificed some of myself for two reasons – one: I love Michael and Kevin, two: because I like a challenge. So I said I can make a rock’n’roll record, so we made it. I looked up and I missed urban music, I missed beats and rhymes, I missed the culture. So I think that’s what I’m doing different now – I’m going back to the land that I love.

What has pushed you to feel so strongly about racial discrimination? Why do you feel like you have to make a stand in bring that out?

I just don’t feel like people have the proper view of what we can all be; I think they categorise people based on where they happened to live; maybe most of the African Americans are mostly poor there, so that’s how they think African Americans are. That’s not reality – the reality is a cosmopolitan, metropolitan area which is showing you all walks of life, in all social economics, all colours, poor white people, rich black people, poor black people, rich white people, rich Asian... I mean it’s not all about social economics, what I am saying is that we are not pigeoned-holed or placed in a box because of racism. I had the privelege growing up in an area like that but most people haven’t. And as I travelled the nation, I begin to see that people are calling me nigger lover because I am sitting next to Tait on a flight. So we still have a massive problem on our hands, I mean Christ told us to love and that’s the area of love He has put in my heart. And I also just want to wake people up to where we can go.

Yesterday at your house, you really had a ball introducing some new young artists. Can you talk to us about your heart for mentoring other Christian artists?

I mean that’s really the reason for Gotee Records. There’s definitely a heart – of course it’s a smart business move but that’s not why I signed Out Of Eden, I signed them because I saw three girls that were raised by their mum who loved Jesus and wanted to make music that would lift him up and they wanted to do it in their style not their mum’s style. So that’s what’s Gotee is all about, to this day. Since tobyMac has started, mentoring has really slowed down recently. When I walk off backstage at a festival and I see my Gotee artists, we have real conversations. So there is still some mentoring going on. It’s just that my world has been crazy so that the one-on-one intimacy of mentoring hasn’t been there as much. Hopefully my lifestyle is mentoring and they are seeing the choices that I am making and I know that some responsibility is on my shoulders but I am just relying on God’s grace and his mercy that I’m stepping through the right doors.

I will say this – I think we need to continue or we will lose youth culture specifically as an industry if we don’t continue to shed the light on youth culture of music. I think it is every artist’s responsibility and labels to be pointing – to continue to point back just like a guy like Bill Gaither, one of my mentors who I look up to as far as how he does business and how he loves God. He is a guy who is constantly ushering in new talent. Constantly taking the spotlight off when he’s been doing or using that spotlight to introduce somebody new. And that was really the moral that I was following because I always had applauded him and his ability to send off artists and introduce them internationally.